THE NEWYORKER, FEBRUARY 10, 2020 71
the Schuhplattler dance, in which par-
ticipants slap the soles of their shoes. In
the second movement of Beethoven’s
Seventh, he pictures a group of pilgrims
singing “Sancta Maria.” Musicologists
may not accept all of these ideas, but
scholarly certitude is not the point. The
images are plausible and potent, and they
help the musicians find focus in their
playing. On the Pittsburgh recording of
the Seventh, the ostinato rhythm in the
second movement takes on a distinctive
vocal contour, with changing inflections
from one note to the next.
The liner notes to the Reference re-
leases, which are superbly engineered, in-
clude lengthy essays by Honeck, in which
he lays out his reasoning on an almost bar-
by-bar basis. His reading of the Bruckner
Ninth as a kind of symphonic Mass—
a hidden Miserere text in the first move-
ment, an Agnus Dei in the third, with a
demonic Scherzo interceding—goes a
long way toward explaining how the re-
cording attains such scouring intensity.
D
uring my visit to Pittsburgh, Honeck
was preparing a concert performance
of Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” the version from
1806—the second of three iterations of
an eternally problematic opera. Although
the final incarnation of the score, from
1814, remains the most dramatically per-
suasive, the earlier versions, both known
as “Leonore,” have much to recommend
them, particularly in the sometimes ri-
otous inventiveness of Beethoven’s or-
chestration. Honeck told me that he is
especially fond of a duet, cut in 1814, in
which the characters Leonore and Mar-
zelline are shadowed by a cello and a vi-
olin, respectively.
I watched a rehearsal with several of
the vocal soloists—Nicole Chevalier
sang the title role, and Eric Cutler por-
trayed Florestan, the heroine’s impris-
oned husband—and then a run-through
of the complete score. Honeck stopped
many times to apply his passionate me-
ticulousness. In the scene in which Flo-
restan finds Leonore unconscious,
Honeck encouraged Cynthia Koledo
DeAlmeida, the orchestra’s principal
oboe, to play more hesitantly, with grop-
ing phrases: “He is insecure. What is
happening? Is she dead or alive?” After
“Dort sank sie hin”—“There she sank
down”—an F-sharp dominant seventh
in the strings gives way to a G-major
triad. Honeck lavished a few minutes
on this passing moment, coaxing the
strings to let the first chord collapse into
the second, without a break. The result
was a shiver of Wagnerian Liebestod.
The Pittsburgh recordings are full of
such unexpected epiphanies. In the Bee-
thoven Fifth, a work almost impossible
to play in a fresh-sounding way, Honeck
establishes an explosive tension between
the thunderous four-note motto and
the sotto-voce dialogue that follows in
the strings. In the coda of the first move-
ment, that motto blares forth from a
seldom noticed inner voice in the horns,
to stunning effect. (This happens at 6:36
on the Reference disk.) A similar jux-
taposition of brutality and delicacy lends
drama to Bruckner, a composer who is
too often treated like a stone-faced mon-
ument. The diabolical tendency that
Honeck detects in the Ninth’s Scherzo
is only heightened by passages of Schu-
bertian lyricism and Mendelssohnian
sprightliness. The return of the ham-
mering main motif feels all the more
apocalyptically abrupt.
No conductor can exercise equal au-
thority in all repertory. Before observ-
ing the “Fidelio” rehearsals, I attended
a Sunday-matinée concert at which the
orchestra played Bartók’s Concerto for
Orchestra and Ravel’s “Boléro,” and ac-
companied the gifted young Korean pi-
anist Seong-Jin Cho in Liszt’s Second
Concerto. Everything was brilliantly ex-
ecuted, but the concert gravitated to-
ward the kind of standard-issue orches-
tral virtuosity that Honeck generally
avoids. I remember more grit and fire
in a rendition of the Bartók that the late
Mariss Jansons elicited from this great
orchestra in 2000. Honeck periodically
leads contemporary music, yet there is
no obvious pattern to his explorations.
For the most part, the classical-music
world is in need of conductors with broad
horizons, who can guide audiences from
a passive worship of the past to an ac-
tive awareness of the present. The rote
repetition of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms,
and Mahler ultimately does those com-
posers no favors. But we also need con-
ductors who know how to revitalize the
grand tradition—and orchestras that can
respond in kind. At the moment, Pitts-
burgh is one of the few places on the in-
ternational scene where that alchemy
regularly happens.
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